Review of Lost in Space (1998) by Phil H — 08 Oct 2014

Hey you remember Matt LeBlanc? he was in Friends for virtually the entire of the 90's and just like Jennifer Aniston he simply can't shake his character, yes...him.

So this is an adaptation of the rather lame US TV series of the same name which always kinda seemed like a rip off of Star Trek with kids. Being your typical 90's action flick the film is chock full of terrible CGI, from a really nasty looking space alien monkey thing to lots of shockingly bad looking light and space effects.

There is a combination of model work which in places does look reasonable but alas most other areas of the film such as the sets are really poor and plastic-ish in appearance, whilst costumes are merely dull grey and unoriginal.

The plot is a complete jumbled jigsaw of a mess involving the age old notion of time travel, unfortunately you really have to have a tight plot to pull this off annnnd this doesn't. You don't care about any of the characters down to stale acting, Lacey Chabert looks as if she's been swimming the whole time yet is oddly quite sexy with her squeaky voice. She was 16 at the time I believe, should I be locked up?! Even Hurt can't inject quality into this pantomime, Oldman fares somewhat better but there really isn't anything he could of done.

The original series was camp family space age fun so of course the film was never gonna be serious sci-fi but clearly they wanted it to be semi serious. This was the problem because the whole thing is basically a cartoon or as I like to think of it...Schumacher's 'Batman and Robin' in space...with Matt LeBlanc who was clearly added to capitalize on his brief moment in the limelight. Just another attempted fast food franchise rolled off the Hollywood factory line, badly conceived, poorly made and vanished into movie obscurity.